Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835158

by ReadCarlBarks • 3 years ago

468 362 3 years ago

bugzilla.mozilla.org

Many users on Mozilla support communities and Reddit are reporting that their browsing sessions were suddenly interrupted by an overlay ad for Mozilla VPN today.

To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page.

drivers99• 3 years ago

I got that too. They just closed the ticket too:

Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED

Closed: 1 minute ago

Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME

sfink2• 3 years ago

Yeah, that closure was completely uncommented and mysterious. A later comment linked to a bug saying that the ad had been disabled, presumably because it was showing up where it shouldn't? WORKSFORME doesn't seem like the right resolution for that.

mikl• 3 years ago

The list of Mozilla bullshit you have to use about:config to get rid of grows ever longer. Still annoyed that Pocket can’t be removed like a regular extension, only disabled in about:config.

cwillu2• 3 years ago

Also, about:config is disabled on mobile unless you're running a nightly build.

xattt• 3 years ago

To disable this, users need to set browser.vpn_promo.enabled to false on the about:config page

How the fuck are you supposed to know about this in advance and prevent this from happening‽

pessimizer• 3 years ago

If you knew about it ahead of time they would have changed it. The point is to show you advertising that you don't want to see.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

look at the source code! Simple!

folmar• 3 years ago

Usually you would just use one of the common user.js files for fixing firefox, for example https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox

avg_dev• 3 years ago

I had this happen... I didn't and still don't understand what was going on.

Edit: as noted in the linked ticket, there are some discussions going on about this in https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/ .

mtmail• 3 years ago

Last year Firefox displayed a Disney ad (for the movie 'Turning Red') on the whats-new tab, the tab gets diplayed by default after you upgrade to a new Firefox version I think. US users only.

Screenshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220308222503/https://www.mozil...

HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30608022

Aeolun6• 3 years ago

I can sort of live with that? The what’s new page is not my content that is being invaded with ads.

When they start popping it up all over the place is when I draw the line.

userbinator6• 3 years ago

I bet that more than a few users were "turning red" --- with anger --- when they saw that shit. "Did I get infected with something?" No, it's just Firefox itself being the adware.

rrdharan• 3 years ago

Don’t forget the Mr. Robot debacle: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robo...

They pull this crap all the time and never learn their lessons.

zo13• 3 years ago

Or how about how they still replace pinned shortcuts in the new page with sponsored ads. Like the magical top left one that I don't even look at before clicking because it's a link to my mail.

Two years later and they're still doing it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/ppludl/since_when_...

nubinetwork• 3 years ago

Not to defend Firefox, but I believe Mr Robot is what caused them to make a visible toggle for experiments. Sadly it's not off by default, but once it's turned off, you don't really have to worry about it. That said, I never saw this VPN popup.

lambda• 3 years ago

Yep, I got this too. Absolutely unacceptable.

PrimeMcFly7• 3 years ago

I switched to LibreWolf (A fork of Firefox with privacy enhancements and ublock preinstalled) and haven't had to deal with anything like this since.

mattl3• 3 years ago

What’s your user agent with that browser?

PrimeMcFly7• 3 years ago

Same as FireFox normal.

ReadCarlBarks4• 3 years ago

Just have in mind that some advanced privacy enhancements (like toggling privacy.resistFingerprinting) can break sites in random ways: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1666160 .

PrimeMcFly7• 3 years ago

privacy.resistFingerprinting is something I had to set to false in my user.js, but I had my own user.js with my own privacy settings anyway. The rest of the settings it provides are very good for a default though.

account4215• 3 years ago

Breaking (shitty and user-hostile) websites by default is still a lot better than ignoring your privacy preferences and trying to psychologically manipulate you by default.

mikae12• 3 years ago

I switched to Librefox

You mean LibreWolf?

PrimeMcFly7• 3 years ago

Yes, thanks. Fixed.

pyridines• 3 years ago

This happened to me while I was working on a site. It may even have been localhost. This seriously erodes my trust in Firefox

bhhaskin5• 3 years ago

This is unacceptable. Mozilla has shown they are incapable of not abusing Firefox. There shouldn't be an advertising channel/system in the browser.

If you want to advertise, have a newsletter that people can opt into.

If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.

echelon3• 3 years ago

This was them trying to let people pay for Firefox. It was Mozilla VPN.

Everyone gets angry and has an opinion of how this sucks. There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla. Nothing they do will work or make everyone happy.

Google won.

redundantly3• 3 years ago

People pay for Firefox by using it. They make money from Google being the default search engine. They were previously getting paid to have yahoo be the default. Bing wants them to switch to them.

The VPN pop-up isn't an effort to provide funding for a dying browser. This is greed, pure and simple.

bhhaskin5• 3 years ago

Mozilla VPN is not Firefox. It's an unrelated service.

It's actually pretty simple for this to work out for Mozilla. Remove the ad system.

dr_kretyn• 3 years ago

I actually have Mozilla VPN but still got the ad. Granted, the VPN wasn't active at the time, but now I feel less about paying for it.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

Google won.

Because Mozilla and its execs were asleep at the wheel while Google started to eat its share. This is what you get when you stop competing.

zzzeek• 3 years ago

Why would I want to buy a VPN if I just wanted to buy Firefox ?

olyjohn2• 3 years ago

They allow donations too. Nothing has stopped anybody from paying. All you had to do was go pay. Pick some amount. Even five fucking dollars.

It's fine for them to create Mozilla VPN. It's never, ever fine to use the same old dark bullshit patterns, and interrupt me on all my computers, same as all these other dirtbag tech companies. They are supposed to be different, and give a shit about the user. Sorry if this is their only way to advertise, but it's not okay.

jjulius• 3 years ago

This was them trying to let people pay for Firefox. It was Mozilla VPN.

... what kind of logic is this?

There's no way for this to work out for Mozilla.

Sure there is - give people an option to pay for Firefox itself.

account4215• 3 years ago

I know right? Mozilla has tried showing ads to people multiple times, ignored their privacy preferences at every opportunity, keeps protecting them from working extensions and generally copies Chrome whenever possible and their market share still keeps going donw. If only it wasn't for the damned entitled users Mozilla would have been successful by now.

Google won indeed. They won by making Mozilla into their little bitch insted of real competition.

dheera• 3 years ago

If you need money, allow people to pay for just Firefox.

I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.

bhhaskin5• 3 years ago

I absolutely would if the money went to development of Firefox and not to the different activism projects. But that isn't an option.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

I think many people overestimate how many people would pay for Firefox.

I certainly would never pay them if they keep doing that kind of shit

olyjohn2• 3 years ago

I've been donating to them every year for the past 5+ years. Given them every benefit of the doubt... Even defended them. Then this popup came up on all my machines this morning, so no more.

Now to find another browser... Maybe some Firefox fork or something? Like WTF every other browser is Chromium... Man this sucks, I'm about ready to quit the internet.

Ygg2• 3 years ago

I don't think people with realistic expectations have any illusions. Servo couldn't get 10k per year for infra alone.

stefan_• 3 years ago

Thankfully Firefox needs nothing else than be popular and they can forever sell the default search engine for many many millions a year, which I think is a perfectly fine way to fund its development.

Unfortunately they hired a bunch of incompetent executives who would much rather starve Firefox development while spending all of the money on realizing their big business vision where they acquire useless startups then ruin the browser by turning it into a marketing platform for the aforementioned. Besides bonuses and big salary bumps, of course.

zamadatix• 3 years ago

For how often it comes up one would think a $5/m subscription plan would be worth it just to not have the constant complaints about it. Even if 0.0001% of the MAU users (so ~2,000 die hard users) did a $5/month subscription that's $5*12*2,000=$120,000/y. Surely that's enough to implement it if they find pop-up ads for their VPN service over other pages worthwhile.

Instead the current pitch is "buy this $5/m VPN, of which we'll get a small cut of from reselling Mullvad, and still get all of the ads you were complaining about in the browser anyways".

celsoazevedo2• 3 years ago

Most wouldn't pay or donate, but some would.

Thunderbird, for example, gained a new life because of donations: https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving...

yjftsjthsd-h5• 3 years ago

I guess the question is if you can get any significant number of users to pay more than Mozilla would make off of ads for the same users. If you can make $1/mo off of most users and $5/mo off a smaller set of users, the smaller set doesn't have to be that big to make it worth doing financially.

ptman• 3 years ago

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-donate-money...

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/paid-firefox-to-get-rid...

we need to make those the most popular ideas on mozilla connect

sleepytimetea• 3 years ago

Apparently the "fix" is to fix the bug in the idle time calculation.

They marked it Resolved but the popup will still happen after 20 mins of idle time after the fix, if I read the Bug details correctly.

imnotjames• 3 years ago

Per https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1414266#answer-1...

Thank you for reaching out with your concern. Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

I’m always glad that PR people can’t help but speak in such inhuman language that makes it obvious that it’s not a real sentiment but just part of the play.

Wowfunhappy2• 3 years ago

Honestly, I thought it was a pretty strong statement. They basically said "we screwed up."

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

I just saw this a half hour ago... it's still happening.

I was on reddit, and couldn't be sure that it wasn't reddit doing it. Though I half-suspected Firefox. Imagine my surprise when I saw this post.

Nothing about this seems "quickly stopped". The timestamp on your link says nearly 7 hours ago.

cubefox• 3 years ago

It was edited later:

May 25, 2023 at 3:56:49 PM PDT

roughly3• 3 years ago

Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first

This phrase is approaching a Betteridge's law level tell for who’s at the wheel - nobody needs to insist they’re putting people first unless it’s really obvious they’re not.

“My corporate doublespeak has a lot of people asking questions already answered by my corporate doublespeak.”

eikenberry• 3 years ago

This rule doesn't hold in general though... eg. "putting the customer first" is code for treating employees as interchangeable cogs without any voice. But it does mean that they are actually putting the customer ahead of employees.

Wowfunhappy2• 3 years ago

Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

That says to me that Firefox is aware the ad experience did not put people first, and that Firefox broke their commitment. They are discussing internally how this was allowed to happen.

ekianjo4• 3 years ago

Firefox is committed to creating an online experience that puts people first, as such we quickly stopped running the ad experience, and are reviewing internally.

Should read as:

Oops, we got caught again doing stuff that our core users don't like. Let us remove this until we find a better way to make you angry

userbinator6• 3 years ago

They are certainly putting people first --- those people being precisely the bastards who came up with this crap.

I still remember when the slogan was something like "putting users in control of their online experience", got silently changed to "individuals" instead of "users" at some point, and apparently it's just "people" now.

CrimsonCape• 3 years ago

From the link:

https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/browser/components/n...

"Messaging System"

"Vision"

"Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice."

"That voice will respect the user’s attention while surfacing contextually relevant and timely information tailored to their individual needs and choices."

Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** who orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product. And then cajole/order/encourage another subordinate to write a florid virtuous editorial justifying their belligerent idea.

ReadCarlBarks4• 3 years ago

write a florid virtuous editorial

dingledork693• 3 years ago

Thanks so much for linking that. This is 1000% on point and I'm so confused with what mozilla has been doing the past few years. It's like the organization as a whole suffered a stroke, and the result is this flowery meaningless prose.

isaacremuant5• 3 years ago

I'm sorry, Mozilla. It's been a good ride this past few decades, but I think it's time we parted, because with all due respect, I am now questioning the sanity of your staff. This is not how any normal person or company would describe its new software innovations. This is the language of lunacy. Frankly, you sound unhinged

I think he has missed the current year jargon which is a mix of corporate BS words and Buzzfeed diversity and inclusion crap. It usually means nothing other than:

"We are doing this because of profit or because we want to further censor discussion about something because the right view is X and that's what you're allowed to think and say.

Any dissent will be responded with a negative label on your person and, if possible, deplatforming, which is good, because we know what the one true way is"

They will phrase it as "in order to improve things for consumers, everyone" while literally screwing over a myriad of those people.

Firefox is still a great browser but Mozilla has long been a company that we can barely trust, in the way that it actively is telling us that we need to subscribe to its very US centric partisan politics and view of the world, which has shifted from actual fairness and openness for all vi virtue of being a customizable browser.

qingcharles• 3 years ago

Wow. Just wow. WTF Mozilla o_O

I still love you though, Firefox. Your heart is in the right place. You're now a lone wolf in a ocean of Chromium and wonky WebKits.

labster2• 3 years ago

The man who typed those artisanal words of inspiration to Firefox Connect deserves our most authentic kudos for bringing that insightful vision of change to the world.

Mozilla brand managers should be the first jobs replaced by AI.

NikolaNovak2• 3 years ago

Hmm.

On one hand, I largely agree with everything that blog posts says.

BUT!

it presents it as some universal, self-evident truth, and I think it's not. Just because the blog author and I and some others think so, doesn't mean it's the only perspective or that everybody feels that way.

I think there exist people who will enjoy that language, who will understand that language, and to whom that language speaks. My wife, possibly. My sister, almost certainly. Many others in my circle of friends, co-workers, and acquaintances.

And, it's Mozilla. I don't think it's 100% accurate to say "you're a tech company" or that FireFox is "just a browser". Mozilla foundation is non-profit, and it does have goals and vision. It is, I think inherently "political", though not necessarily in the current American sense of "political" which seems to mean "partisan" or "bad". It has a goal and perspective and a point of view. It's trying to do something beyond generate profit for shareholders, so I don't think it's accurate to brand it as "just a tech company" (whether one agrees with its goals, methods and progress is orthogonal).

Ultimately, some people DO choose Firefox as a political statement (that statement perhaps being as simple as "I support independent choice of technology" or "I want my browser to work for me" or even "I don't want Google to COMPLETELY own my life" :). Some people DO see it as a way to vote, or impart a change.

brigandish• 3 years ago

More of this is coming down the road, it's the kind of vapid nonsense that children are being force fed from school right into uni. Along with wondering if the internet has improved life in general, I now seriously suspect that education was better when it was truly elitist.

surgical_fire6• 3 years ago

As for "making the world a better place", again, there seems to be some kind of implicit political agenda.

Ironically, Firefox could make the world a slightly better place (in a very specific aspect of the world) if they focused simply in making a great web browser, without unnecessary bells and whistles and without any politic posturing, but that aimed at denting the Chrome monopoly.

GeekyBear• 3 years ago

write a florid virtuous editorial

Frankly, it's much less problematic than Google writing a blog post bragging to it's advertising customers that it has started buying a copy of everyone's credit/debit card transaction data so they can spy on potential customers more than ever.

as Google said in a blog post on its new service for marketers, it has partnered with “third parties” that give them access to 70 percent of all credit and debit card purchases.

So, if you buy stuff with a card, there’s a less than one-in-three chance that Google doesn’t know about it.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/05/25/242717/google-no...

hutzlibu• 3 years ago

" I don't want a Web browser company to "make the world a better place""

I do actually would like the non profit Mozilla to make the world a better place: by focussing again on building a 100% open source and user controlled browser, that has no ads or tracking (studies) enabled by default.

redeeman4• 3 years ago

and this is why firefox was in freefall.. focus changed from making good product, to making anything but. The worst part is mozilla doesnt even understand.

also, what is up with the employees there? arent people in tech privileged enough to be able to find jobs? how can they live with themselves participating in crap like that? How do they stand in front of the mirror?

wsc981• 3 years ago

Whenever I read or hear “opinionated” I always get reminded of the saying: “opinions are like assholes; everybody has one and all of them stink”.

NikkiA• 3 years ago

That's been my experience since I first saw the word applied to programming languages, and I mentally replied 'ok, but your opinion is objectively wrong!'

matkoniecz4• 3 years ago

In many cases some opinions are clearly superior over others.

Compare "war crimes are bad for multiple reasons" and "lets torture, murder and loot and that is fine because they are subhumans".

Universal bothsideism is not a good idea.

DangitBobby2• 3 years ago

I prefer "and no one wants to hear yours".

jorvi2• 3 years ago

Firefox must be an opinionated user agent that keeps folks safe, informed and effective while browsing the Web. In order to have an opinion, Firefox must have a voice.

It’s ironic (and extremely sad) how they say that but staunchly refuse to add ad-blocking to iOS Firefox. And the code is already right there, in Firefox Focus.

I’ve pushed everyone in my circle to Brave and told them to disable / ignore the crypto bits.

Safety first, and unfortunately Mozilla does not care about iOS users their safety.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

Firefox can't even be Firefox on iOS and is only a reskinned Safari. So, I'm more concerned that Firefox for iOS even exists since it's kind of a bait&switch to what a Firefox user would expect the browser to be. How would we all fell if we downloaded a browser like Firefox or Chrome on the desktop but to find out it was really a totally different browser?

So playing by the reskinned rules, blockers are not allowed in the way someone using Firefox would expect. Not just blockers, but any extension. It's such a totally not-Firefox experience, that it is even hard to type that it is Firefox.

tiffanyg• 3 years ago

When I read "... Somewhere in all of these companies exists the belligerent ** ...", I couldn't help but think of the Bill Burr bit on "chain restaurants":

https://youtu.be/QWCINJ8uvIc?t=1m8s

(cut out some of background to focus on where he gets to similar patter)

In any case, fully agree. There are always these environmental pressures and "agents" (to evoke / use a sort of game theory modeling context) that lead to this sort of nonsense. Depending on the incentives, scope of power of people making decisions, training (esp., MBAs - simply being trained to look at "numbers in spreadsheets", essentially), etc., it's all too easy, these days, to end up with this kind of B$.

SheinhardtWigCo• 3 years ago

The "that voice" part is actually hilarious.

dreamcompiler• 3 years ago

I just installed Firefox on a new machine today. The number of switches I had to manually turn off to make it not collect data from me and not show me ads was surprisingly large. And even though I turned off all the ones I saw, I don't know if it was a complete solution.

I really don't want to use Chrome. Please stop with the enshittification, Firefox.

userbinator6• 3 years ago

And even though I turned off all the ones I saw, I don't know if it was a complete solution.

Look in about:config if you haven't already, and take a grep through the source for the full list of settings that you can adjust. It is indeed disturbingly large and the majority of them aren't officially documented either.

oconnor663• 3 years ago

orders the subordinates to inject inappropriate profit-seeking changes into the product

Sometimes it's a person, sure, but I think often it's the broad system of reviews and promotions. Above a certain size, it's impossible for higher-ups in an organization to know what everyone below them is doing, and the organization has to rely on metrics. Things that are easy to measure get prioritized.

leroy-is-here• 3 years ago

Firefox shows literal advertisements in the “new tab” window. I recently started using Firefox again because I was told I was being “ridiculous” when I said Firefox shows me literal advertisements. And then I get this pop-up on a window which hadn’t been refreshed in several hours.

sergiomattei• 3 years ago

You can disable them in less than a minute.

I haven’t seen a single ad since the moment I installed Firefox and clicked “don’t suggest stuff”.

grayhatter• 3 years ago

The reason people are upset isn't because you can't disable it. The frustration comes from the fact you need to be able to trust your web browser. And mistakes like this, mistakes that are so egregious, and demonstrate such bad judgement, that it makes it harder to trust something that you need to be able to trust.

cdme• 3 years ago

Yeah they were weird to see until I turned them off immediately. I don't like the direction they've taken Pocket in with so much focus on "editorial" content. Instapaper's better at getting out of the way (even if it feels neglected).

gpm• 3 years ago

I have. Every time it updates it opens a new tab to spam about their VPN (or whatever the flavour of the month is).

Rebelgecko• 3 years ago

Where's the "don't suggest stuff" box? That seems much easier than the multiple about:config changes I'd have to do to turn off all of the new avenues for advertising

matkoniecz4• 3 years ago

Ads by default are still not acceptable to me.

Yes, I am willing to pay say 100$/year for web browser if money would entirely go to development. Maybe something to support staff like CEO. But not over 5 000 000 per year ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#Negative_salary... )

And if such browser would be actually user-first, without ads for VPN and Disney movies (especially without ads pretending to not be ads).

lolinder12• 3 years ago

I did—I saw this one. I can't keep opting out of every new abusive system Mozilla puts in. I'm done.

cge• 3 years ago

I disabled suggestions on installation some time ago.

Then it appears they recently added an additional sponsored option, and defaulted it to enabled, in an update, even for users like myself who had every other sponsored option disabled.

They're hardly the only organization that does this, but it is extremely disappointing. Were Firefox not the only major browser with very useful extensions, I'd certainly switch to something else.

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

Every time I open Firefox it presents me with some message instead of content I want. Usually in the form of a new tab. Sometimes, it's a pop-under new window (I think this is some weird interaction with its restoration of previous sessions). Every now and then, it's one of those plus some call-out bubble message or a pop-up window.

Safari practically never does that shit, which is one of the reasons I prefer it on platforms where it's available. IDK why modern Firefox is so damn eager to interrupt me. Just open a window with my last session or my default tab and shut up. I don't care if you just updated. I don't care if you're weirdly-enthusiastic about introducing me to a feature that hasn't been novel in a browser in at least a couple decades (color themes—LOL, that was just embarrassing). I certainly don't want an actual advertisement. And for god's sake, no, I still don't care about Pocket, and I never will.

For less-technical users, this stuff isn't just annoying, it can disrupt their entire browsing session. "Wait... where's my email? Is it gone? Is this the right program?" Firefox (and other teams that do crap like this, in their products) should knock it off. It is not OK.

asdff4• 3 years ago

Just set new tab to blank page. the benefits from using something like firefox and ublock origin outweigh the cons of, well I don't even know what the cons are considering my firefox is just a pure web browser as configured. One thing that's proved true over my years in tech is that there isn't any tool that works perfectly out of the box as I expect without at least some configuration and settings fiddling.

gazby• 3 years ago

I've had the Mozilla VPN website open for a few days with an intent to purchase when I get around to it. Not anymore.

I love you Mozilla, but you've gotta do better. Please.

internet2000• 3 years ago

I haven't trusted Mozilla since the Pocket incident. I see they haven't learned the lesson.

koito17• 3 years ago

I have no idea how I consistently miss all of the random advertisements Mozilla apparently does in Firefox. Then again, I have a heavily customized Firefox and I'm used to every 5 or so versions breaking something in my userChrome.css or hiding a button I didn't ask for.

mikae12• 3 years ago

Go arken. https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js

matrix_overload• 3 years ago

Firefox has been going downhill for a while now, so it's not surprising.

That said, if you don't want to use Chrome, a fairly good alternative would be Vivaldi [0] - a surprisingly neat browser created by the ex-founder of Opera. It's based on the Chromium engine, so no weird rendering shenanigans, but at the same time is quite technically capable, with ad blocking, mouse gestures, email client, etc.

[0] https://vivaldi.com/

Phrodo_00• 3 years ago

It's based on the Chromium engine

Google has enough control over the internet as is, thank you.

I'd really wish there were other gecko browsers now. Epiphany was good but they switched to Webkit.

Edit: Just learned of LibreWolf. Might be looking into migrating over.

Snuupy• 3 years ago

I have a saner list of defaults here: https://gist.github.com/Snuupy/6dbb69bf667385db0a530ccb85926...

keyboardJones• 3 years ago

There's also Mullvad browser: https://mullvad.net/en/browser

em-bee• 3 years ago

we need alternatives that are not based on chromium.

charcircuit• 3 years ago

Why? Chromium works well and is easy to extend. It also comes with many security features, includes the latest and greatest standards, has good performance, and is actively maintained.

It lets you focus on creating the best browser possible instead of wasting time working on the parts of the browser engine which aren't relevant to your product.

kps2• 3 years ago

How do they make money?

toyg2• 3 years ago

Last time I checked, they basically resold aggregated behaviour data.

One day, maybe, someone might finally understand that web browsers have become utilities, and regulate them.

james4k• 3 years ago

I just got this ad when opening a new tab. Wild.

tedunangst4• 3 years ago

It's really weird how every time this happens, Firefox promises it will never happen again until next time.

cookiengineer2• 3 years ago

Happened to me too, even though I thought all ads were disabled in my modified libre/wolf profile.

I guess I have to go back to ungoogled chromium as my main browser again and start working again on RetroKit.

Good bye Mozilla, thanks for now being the corporation hell hole that you initially fought against.

I guess that's what happens if you fire the people that actually cared for the project.

asdff4• 3 years ago

You can unmozila firefox just like your chromium too. When I open a new tab I see a blank page, no pocket, no suggested whatever, no bullshit. I'd take firefox just to be able to use full on ublock origin (1).

1. https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...

sovok_x2• 3 years ago

At this point I just wonder whether Firefox userbase will flee the browser in droves if someone will make its unmozilled tracking fork sustained by easily payable tips, that has all the BS disabled and uBlock + couple of other top 10 extensions like Stylus and Tampermonkey natively implemented in it, with a good unified UI and all, for added value.

blibble• 3 years ago

firefox is an extremely hard product to recommend to friends/family

it's becoming more and more user hostile with every upgrade

pocket everywhere, telemetry, vpn ads, disney ads, amazon ads etc

(and despite the constant UI changes it still feels like something out of 1997)

NotYourLawyer• 3 years ago

And yet it’s someone the least shitty browser there is.

lost_tourist3• 3 years ago

It's all quite easy to turn off, or just recommend librewolf to them

lolinder12• 3 years ago

No, it's not. Every few months there's a new garbage "experience" released under a new about:config setting. Playing whack-a-mole with ads from the browser by navigating through a scary-looking UI that warns you that it's dangerous is not an experience I can recommend to family or friends.

2h• 3 years ago

reposted, since they are trying to silence and confuse:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835182

trashface• 3 years ago

This happened to me a couple hours ago. The page it displayed over was chat gpt. I thought, well I guess mozilla has to make money somehow!

mnadkvlb• 3 years ago

Can someone recommend how to disable the firefox update popup on osx latest ? I have already disabled the updates checking background service.

(disclaimer: i agree to security issues and stuff due to not updating, i manage my firwalls and adblocks to prevent getting hacked, and take full responsibility in case i get hacked, thank you).

tysam_and• 3 years ago

I ironically got the same popup while sitting on the HackerNews homepage.

The top article on the homepage was this one, visible through the dark-ish tint behind the ad.

Lol.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

Yep, this happened completely at random and I'm pretty sure the browser focused itself.

suby• 3 years ago

Mozilla deserves to fail. This is absolutely unacceptable, it makes me irrationally angry. I've been using Firefox since 2004, I'm tired of these tactics. We're now playing whack a mole with their settings with things like advertising on the new tab page, user studies (which seems to randomly get re-enabled on updates), and now I need to add an opt out for this specific advertisement in my about:config? How many future advertisements am I going to need to opt out of on an individual basis as they come up? It's akin to what Microsoft is doing with their many toggles required to change the default browser settings.

Even if there were a setting to opt out of everything it would be unacceptable. Might as well use Chromium if they are going to pull this shit. I'm just done with this, Mozilla deserves to fail.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 3 years ago

Yes it deserves to fail. But can any of us afford for it to do so?

account4215• 3 years ago

Yes. Can we afford for it to not fail and keep preventing any real alternative from gaining momentum?

lost_tourist3• 3 years ago

I turned off ads as soon as they added them and have no issues. I'm not sure why everyone is being overly dramatic about this. Furthermore, I subscribe to their relay service, so it pitches a couple bucks a month to them. I vote with my wallet. I don't think everything should be free or lose my mind when I see an annoyance in something that I get a ton of utility out of. The world isn't a perfect place.

lolinder12• 3 years ago

I turned off ads and I still saw this ad today. It sounds like this one is behind a new setting.

I subscribe to their relay service, so it pitches a couple bucks a month to them. I vote with my wallet.

I would love to vote with my wallet. I want to donate to Firefox directly. If they'd given me an option to donate and have the money go to Firefox and not Mozilla's other pet projects, I'd happily have set up a recurring monthly donation for it.

xg154• 3 years ago

One of the related tickets [1] seems to give some hints on the root cause - which in a way almost makes it worse IMO.

Basically, what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back.

Unfortunately (or maybe not) the detection logic had a bug, which caused the message to pop up right away sometimes, spoiling the whole thing.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1835175

lamontcg• 3 years ago

I think it worked entirely 'correctly', and yet still annoyed the shit out of me.

housemusicfan• 3 years ago

what they wanted to do was to build a background process that detects when you're away from the PC and then pops up the message, so it's the first thing you see what you get back

This unnecessary bullshit is how you introduce security bugs into software. Mozilla can preach all they want about security and privacy but this shows that it's all rotten to the core.

esprehn• 3 years ago

Are you sure that code is related to this? That looks specific to the new tab page while the linked bug on HN shows a random website.

xg154• 3 years ago

It was linked in the "related" section of the original bug.

isaacremuant5• 3 years ago

This is terrible. I don't want their popups ever. Why do they feel they can block popups by default from others but their popups are fine?

Really hate Firefox doing this kind of thing. It's supposed to be a browser that cares about the user.

wejick• 3 years ago

When this kind of things happened, I'm sure it's an honest mistake and someone has learned a very good lesson.

throwaway290• 3 years ago

Probably this whole story comes down to "there's 'Allow Firefox to make personalized extension recommendations setting' and it is on by default".

ants_everywhere• 3 years ago

I've been using IceCat recently as part of a video project I'm doing. I started using Guix just for fun and IceCat happens to be the version of Firefox they have available by default. It has some quirks but it's overall pretty usable and strips Mozilla branding.

It's a shame because I pay for Mozilla features, including Mozilla VPN. But I find this behavior (1) kind of gross, and (2) a clear signal of either desperation or indifference to their mission.

crossroadsguy• 3 years ago

It’s like Google and Mozilla just don’t want me to leave Apple’s phone OS and its browser, respectively.

At least in Google’s case it makes good business sense - as in, it already works for them and their target audience already has been using the OS with all that, and doesn’t care about it, ads and tracking; besides there aren’t too many phone OS options.

But in the case of Mozilla? Heck the target audience cares very much about these things and not liking shit like this was a reason they were in Firefox for. Now a lot have already dumped it for Safari, Brave etc. Then they keep doing such tricks.

Someone at Mozilla has to be especially dumb to have done this.

jay_kyburz• 3 years ago

But you can't run uBlock Origin on Apple as far as I'm aware?

Aeolun6• 3 years ago

Yeah, I guess they’re aware that there’s basically no alternatives for their audience?

If there were a viable non-chromium alternative to Firefox I’d already have switched.

itsuka• 3 years ago

I've been using Firefox as my main browser to support its decreasing market share, alongside Safari for development and Ungoogled Chromium when things are unexpectedly broken in Firefox (due to strict privacy settings most of the time). I'm considering dropping Firefox because I don't want to deal with updating about:config anymore to remove ads, telemetry, etc. The other two browsers just work for me.

Edit: this is not completely true - I enabled Private Relay (Safari only) and installed uMatrix and uBlock Origin on Chromium, but that's about it.

schemescape2• 3 years ago

the target audience cares very much about these things

I recently switched from Edge to Firefox (on both Desktop and phone) specifically because Edge was showing me irrelevant "news" articles (which I assume are just ads in disguise) [1].

I guess on phone I can move back to Safari (which I abandoned due to a bug where scroll position is frequently lost when navigating backwards), since it is apparently the only major browser that hasn't tried to show me ads.

Not sure what to do about desktop...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35705502

mvdtnz• 3 years ago

This bug is closed as a duplicate of a bug which is itself closed as a duplicate of this bug.

frozenlettuce• 3 years ago

That should be a accessibility disaster baked right into the browser(related to yesterday's anti-modal post)

jeroenhd• 3 years ago

I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".

No "stop showing me ads", "disable recommendations", "show privacy settings", instead, just "not now". This illusion of choice is a very common dark pattern that helps people feel like postponing ads was their choice (and their idea) rather than making them feel upset that ads have snuck into their browser in the first place. Websites run by trash marketeers like Reddit and Twitter do the same thing.

I wonder how long it'll take before I will just switch to some Chrome fork. This whole "privacy first" shtick is nice but if I need to turn off as many settings in Firefox to make my browser pleasant to use as I do privacy settings in Chrome, I don't see the advantage.

Last time I checked brave they were still pushing their shady crypto stuff and the UI was kind of meh. I wonder if I should reevaluate it with the ongoing erosion of Firefox as a browser.

Aeolun6• 3 years ago

There’s this weird new browser for mac that I think is called Arc?

anderber• 3 years ago

Are they private by default or do you need to make adjustments to the settings to it? So far Brave seems to be the most private popular browser out-of-box.

Nextgrid3• 3 years ago

Maybe it was Orion Browser?

jabroni_salad• 3 years ago

I'm not sure about their user experience either. The website for it has zero concrete information and you can't even see that there is no windows support until you give it an email address.

skykooler2• 3 years ago

Is there a chrome based browser which has an equivalent to Firefox’s multi-account containers? That’s the main feature keeping me on FF.

lolinder12• 3 years ago

Yep. Specifically, the temporary containers keep me there for web dev stuff. People will always recommend profiles in chrome, but that can't replace a single hotkey to spawn a temporary throwaway container.

JenrHywy• 3 years ago

Not that I've been able to find. Brave would be the obvious candidate to implement this, but the impression I get is that they're not all that interested.

pierat2• 3 years ago

I think the way the dialog is designed says enough. There's "Get Mozilla VPN" and "not now".

Wasn't there a campaign that "no means no", and explicitly not "no means keep asking until you get the answer you were hoping for out of fatigue"?

Oh right. #metoo

verandaguy• 3 years ago

Online ads are a scourge, but it seems really unfair to compare this to #metoo beyond the most superficial aspects.

SilasX4• 3 years ago

Coincidentally, there was the recent TV show, Anatomy of a Scandal, about a fictional rape case where the defense tried to argue that “not now” wasn’t sufficient to withdraw consent for sex.

jeremyjh2• 3 years ago

I've been using Brave for awhile and I'm pretty happy with it. There is the shady crypto thing, and the shady VPN thing, and the dubious Tor thing, and I don't really trust them, but I can't really say any of that affects the browsing experience.

Krasnol• 3 years ago

So because of an ad you'd switch to a browser which breaks ad-blocking add-ons?

utrack• 3 years ago

AFAIR Chrome/Chromium add-ons are unable to block ads and trackers properly - there's a gap between the page load and add-on activation.

hartator• 3 years ago

Upvoting as I feel most posts critical of Mozilla get flagged.

lolinder12• 3 years ago

Mozilla has pulled a lot of dumb crap over the years, but this crossed a hard red line.

I defended them with Pocket, with promotions in the new tab screen, with dumb wastes of time like Colorways. I've continued to evangelize Firefox in spite of the fact that I knew the company had lost touch with reality because I want there to be an alternative to chromium-based browsers.

Today I'm done. I can shrug off promos in the new tab page, in the settings, whatever. But there are no second chances for full-page pop-up ads, especially when the "oops" is in the timing code. "Oops, you were supposed to see that after 20 minutes inactivity" doesn't cut it.

Mozilla has lost it, and I'm done defending them and evangelizing for them.

iJohnDoe• 3 years ago

Agreed. There have been many defenders of Firefox on HN. I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Unrelated mini rants.

1. They fill the default new tab page with garbage content. They have amazing reach with viewers. It’s a shame they can’t fill it with quality stuff. I understand you have to pay the bills, but at least find some balance.

2. Firefox 47.x was the greatest release. I’ve never been able to keep hundreds of tabs open with Firefox. Eventually Firefox eats up so much RAM and eventually crashes. Chromium based browsers can have multiple windows with hundreds of tabs each and not crash even after being open for days/weeks.

Groxx2• 3 years ago

I’m not sure why after all the crap they have pulled over the years.

Have you seen the competition?

It may be disturbingly similar to trying to vote for a decent politician, but there are absolutely degrees of badness.

Plus there are still forks.

zargon• 3 years ago

My desktop has over 2000 tabs open in Firefox. Memory footprint is slightly over 3 gigs. I usually manage to keep the laptop tab count under 1000. Honestly I think you're the first person I've ever heard praise Chrome(ium) for gracefully handling high tab counts.

I'm not a fan Mitchell Baker or many of the ways Mozilla works these days. But in the pulling crap department, Google and Microsoft have given Mozilla a very low bar to clear.

account4215• 3 years ago

I understand you have to pay the bills

You mean like the 5 mil per year CEO salary? Not sure if theat is really a need and not a want.

We need an open source browser that's not operated like a paypig for a for profit company. Funding should be handled via seeking grants and donations, not by selling out the users.

justinclift2• 3 years ago

Yeah, at this point things like LibreWolf seem to be what it's come down to:

https://librewolf.net

Not a fantastic situation, but at least it seems to work.

Zuiii3• 3 years ago

Mullvad Browser is also a really good candidate. The people behind it have a track record for fighting for user privacy unlike Mozilla which has a track record of doing the opposite.

jcul• 3 years ago

Yeah it's pretty bad, it does make me think. I've been a firefox user for probably ~ 2 decades.

Saying that, I haven't personally experienced any pop-ups or ads like this.

webmobdev• 3 years ago

I've been downvoted here many times for voicing this same opinion for a long time. Consider switching to Orion (a fork of Safari WebKit, Mac only, still beta though) - https://browser.kagi.com/ - or PaleMoon (a hard fork of Firefox) - http://www.palemoon.org/, as they are the only browsers that respect your zero-telemetry wish, when you toggle the right settings. Tor Browser (stripped of Tor) - https://www.torproject.org/download/ - is also a very good privacy-hardened Firefox soft fork (though it is yet to fix a bug that still phones Mozilla) but using it generates a lot of Captchas from CloudFlare, and to a lesser extent Google, both seem to hate this browser with a vengeance. Vivaldi browser (a Chromium fork with better privacy options) is another a good option but a distant second because it insists on phoning home every time you use the browser, and Vivaldi has publicly said they will not turn that off as turning off those analytics impairs their monetizing options. (A good application firewall can block those though, and Vivaldi is a decent company).

userbinator6• 3 years ago

What in the bloody hell!?!? Why does everything around the "web ecosystem" seem to grow paternalising adware/spyware-infested user-hostile "features" over time (I have observed this with other software, but browsers in particular seem to be the worst)? This is disturbingly close to Microsoft's tactics with Edge.

A browser doesn't need popups, a "messaging system", "telemetry", or anything other than to show me the content of URLs that I tell it to visit.

felixgallo• 3 years ago

If any readers here are from Mozilla -- everyone involved in this frankly needs to be fired immediately.

toyg2• 3 years ago

I don't know about the engineer who wrote the feature, but definitely any layer of management who came up with the idea and approved it, should be shown the door immediately. It's clear they don't understand the values they're supposed to uphold.

sdf4j• 3 years ago

I'd fire the engineer too. There's no due obedience in software engineering.

weirdindiankid• 3 years ago

This thread led to my discovering and switching to LibreWolf. Here's to a Firefox-ish browser that does better!

wg02• 3 years ago

Developing a browser is almost as close to an effort as writing an OS. Read the Flexbox specs alone. It's complicated and then there are hundreds of such specs. And then it is a moving target, constantly.

Alternatives to Firefox are free. If this software has to survive than enough people will have to pay either directly or indirectly as in case of ads.

What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?

Nextgrid3• 3 years ago

What are other ways that an open source software can survive that cannot have "Open core" or "On premise" options available to it?

Ask for money? Hell there's still not actually any way to pay for Firefox. Even this ad doesn't actually allow you to pay for Firefox, but instead for a service that's useless to the vast majority of people and relies on fear-mongering to sell itself.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

I don't think Mullvad is bad, but I prefer signing up with them directly instead of through Firefox, so I can use it with more different devices. Also whatever they get through the Mullvad deal nurse be a fraction of what you pay. After all Mullvad must supply the service for this money also and make a profit.

What I'd actually pay for is something more elaborate like icloud private relay. Unfortunately Mozilla just cancelled that and it was only in beta in the US.

I'd also pay for Firefox itself if I could (I already donate to the other projects I use a lot like KDE) but I feel a bit disenfranchised with Mozilla still aiming very hard at the mainstream user they have long lost.

wg02• 3 years ago

I'm merely genuinely asking what models exist for free open source software.

Nextgrid3• 3 years ago

I've often said that Firefox is the most user-hostile piece of free & open source software I've used. It is much worse than a lot of paid, proprietary software.

userbinator6• 3 years ago

Open source ended up being exactly what it says: you can see (and change, with enough time and effort) the source code. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn't say anything about the incentives of its authors and their alignment with yours.

I'd still rather patch the binary (which is actually largely a zipped collection of JS that implements most of the UI) than figure out how to compile Firefox from scratch.

Android (at least the AOSP part) and Linux is a similar situation.

jmuguy• 3 years ago

What’s stupid about this is the only people still using Firefox are the people they have to know are going to hate this shit the most. I’d prefer they just charge for the software instead of doing this over and over again, and saying “oops we’re sorry, won’t happen again” every single time.

opportune4• 3 years ago

I wish Mozilla or Microsoft or friends would let me pay $50 extra for a no-bullshit version of their products. It is infuriating when your UX is ruined by a corporation trying to make a couple fucking pennies off you

asdff4• 3 years ago

I'm using firefox and I don't ever see this sort of stuff people complain about. Where does it even appear? I have new tab set to blank page. Are people leaving new tab at default with suggested content?

At the end of the day firefox is a last refuge of a browser that allows me to block tracking and ads. As long as ublock origin works here and nowhere else this is the browser that I will be using. It's that simple, the internet is just too unusable without ad blocking.

DangitBobby2• 3 years ago

I was incredibly surprised today while checking my gmail to see a modal with a darkened background pop-up to cover the entire web page. It was an ad for Mozilla VPN. I did some googling to find out if it was a gmail ad or a FireFox ad but didn't find anything until the bug report was shared here.

wkat42422• 3 years ago

This is what bothers me a lot yes. Especially in terms of features.

Mozilla is still targeting the mainstream user that uses Chrome. Spending a lot of time on gloss and removing 'power' features.

Yet they don't understand they already lost the chrome user years ago so badly that they don't even remember the name. And they're now alienating their remaining userbase.

lucb1e• 3 years ago

Let me put first and foremost that this is shitty.

What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to. The negativity spiral, deserved as it may be, seems to then tip a lot of people (self-proclaimed) towards going with Chrome when that is still the worse option. Looking at Firefox' market share, I feel bad for the shit it gets and what it has to pull to try and stay relevant (.: to pay the devs). At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.

I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again (I'm still salty on a daily basis because the new mouse gestures "extension" is crap compared to the "add-on"-based one from before Firefox 57), because donating adds your email address to their spam list, and because I can't tell them to spend it on useful things like Thunderbird and Firefox rather than developing yet another VPN frontend or buying Pocket. Having a Firefox subscription that gets rid of their ads would not limit what they can spend it on, but it would send a clear message of what it is that I'm wanting to pay for. Wouldn't solve all problems but I wonder if this might help.

lolinder12• 3 years ago

Firefox is supposed to hold itself to a higher standard than Google. It's why it exists, it's why I evangelized it all these years. It's supposed to be the browser that respects its users as human beings, not as conversion numbers.

If Mozilla becomes as bad as Google, then there's no reason to choose them over the larger and more stable platform. That's why we hold them to a higher standard—if they can't meet that standard they have no reason to exist at all.

celsoazevedo2• 3 years ago

I currently don't donate much to Mozilla because they keep making the experience worse time and again

Money donated to Mozilla isn't used to develop Firefox: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/

I'd be fine paying or donating to help Firefox development, but I can't.

stkdump• 3 years ago

I think money spent on VPN and mdn+ goes more directly to funding Mozilla. But I would actually prefer to see a Mozilla that tries to become fiscally independent of partnerships like Google and fully commit to the donation model (+ maybe selling a few products like VPN and mdn+) closer to what Wikipedia is doing.

SilasX4• 3 years ago

What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.

Yes, because FF’s only advantage left is that they’ll actually respect your privacy and control of your machine. They have nothing else! If you want a browser that’s the fastest, or has full featured addons, or is mostly like to work on sites where you need it, sorry, Chrome has them hopelessly, irrevocably beaten.

Privacy is the one area where they could actually claim to be better and yet every so often they’ve shown willingness to abandon that advantage for the slimmest of upsides.

rafark2• 3 years ago

Interesting that you talk about standards because I think the alt browsers are not judged to the same standards as chrome. Brave injected affiliate links. Microsoft edge injected ads on random third party sites, now it’s Mozilla. You won’t see google doing these type of (shady) things. You won’t get explicit stuff from google injected into properties they don’t own without explicit permission from the site owners.

Imagine if google injected random stuff without permission in a site like ycombinator, people would go absolutely nuts and google would be considered diabolic, yet for some reason all other browsers have done similar stuff and they somehow get a pass?

Macha• 3 years ago

If Firefox is not achieving a better standard than Google, then what is the reason for using it over the better resourced Google Chrome? Being better than Google is the bar it needs to meet to overcome the inertia of Chrome's market share

dizhn3• 3 years ago

Not to diminish the point you're making in any way but I thought you could donate directly to Thunderbird development. Did this change?

worrycue• 3 years ago

What irks me about these comment threads is that people hold Mozilla to a standard that nobody holds Google to.

We have already accepted Google as the “bad guy”. “Good guys” are held to a different standard. If Mozilla want to be a “bad guy” too, they will lose to Google who has the better product.

vanilla_nut• 3 years ago

At the same time, I would also not mind an unmozillad firefox, perhaps in exchange for a certain donation amount per year.

LibreWolf (https://librewolf.net/) is essentially this: Firefox, with the telemetry and Mozilla adware disabled. And you can use homebrew or other package managers to handle updates (instead of getting spammed by update dialogs every day or two in the browser itself).

schemescape2• 3 years ago

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

Why does this resolution even exist as an option? There’s no way the big filer will find that satisfactory.

account4215• 3 years ago

It makes sense for when a user claims there is a bug but then doesn't provide any evidence or other information than can be used to track it down and perhaps just disappears entirely. Happens often enough with any even remotely large project.

The problem is using without trying to triage the bug at all.

OneLeggedCat2• 3 years ago

That "WORKSFORME" tag is such a powerful insult at the users.

dizhn3• 3 years ago

Mozilla. They must have some really great and well meaning employees. Otherwise a good product like Firefox (or Thunderbird) would never come out of such a garbage company. Imagine if they were actually a good company with a tech focus.

Zuiii3• 3 years ago

WORKSFORME

Looks like this feature is working as Mozilla intended.

endgame• 3 years ago

Just. Let. Me. Pay. For. The. Browser.

Animats• 3 years ago

There are lots of forks of Firefox. Is there a reliable one without all the crap?

eimrine2• 3 years ago

Why the bug is closed, is this wontfix? Sorry for not trying hard enough to figure out what's up with this bug, all I can see is

" Opened 8 hours ago Closed 6 hours ago "

scoutt• 3 years ago

Maybe relevant:

"Firefox VPN Spotlight modal test content" [0]

We are running a/b tests on a VPN spotlight modal in Firefox. Here's a link to the project info: Google doc

There are two versions of content, identical except for the inclusion of a promotional code in one of them. Where the tests also differ is in the imagery used, which you can see in the Figma file linked in this ticket.

Also,

"Add vpn spotlight targeting" [1]

Targeting to support https://mozilla-hub.atlassian.net/browse/OMC-419 - Existing users with a profile >28 days old, at least 1 day of use in the last 28 days, on Windows 10+, no VPN or Enterprise policy

[0] https://github.com/mozilla-l10n/nimbus-l10n/issues/5

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/experimenter/pull/8853

xnx• 3 years ago

Absolute rule of the attention economy: If someone has your attention, they will eventually try and make money off of it.

gen2203• 3 years ago

IDK if they’re ready for the limelight, but if you’re an internet enthusiast and on the market for a non-Mozilla non-FAANG browser, you should check out The Browser Company’s Arc.

No affiliation, just a happy user for the last year or so. After being a long, long time FF supporter, even through all this tragic disintegration.

0xffff22• 3 years ago

Their website really doesn't tell me anything I want to know about a new browser. Most importantly, is it Chromium based?

gen2203• 3 years ago

Yep, Chromium.

chrisledet• 3 years ago

so are we switching to Brave now?

slater• 3 years ago

Usually you want to switch to something better, not worse.

manx• 3 years ago

Maybe it's time to focus more on servo, a browser engine written in rust, originally created, but later abandoned by Mozilla. Seems like it starts rolling again. https://servo.org/

account4215• 3 years ago

From the screenshots it looks like the popup greyed out the entire browser window, including the window controls. Did this make the window controls non-interactive? If so I will add this to the long list of reasons why application developers cannot be trusted with client-side window decorations.

Firefox displayed a pop-up ad for Mozilla VPN over an unrelated page

Related Stories